Once again, how annoying not to be able to reply to posts I find interesting or objectionable. I did notice an addition to my game board today, the chronos quests. If I am not mistaken this was a feature available to facebook players for quite sometime now. If this is so, then any statement made by a community manager or moderator saying that facebook players had no advantage over us here a the .com site was misleading and not honest. 

In order to level up in this game one must amass experience points, this seems to be, at first glance anyway, an additional source of experience points that we here did not have access to. Now some might say, well you have it now, that is so, but the fact is that if others possessed it and we did not it did give them a huge advantage towards levelling up depending on the duration of time they had it compared to us.

While the moderators and community manager's statements used to be full of the term "game balance", I do not see it mentioned with regularity now, unless it is an obscure irrelevant point they are making about something other than the true game balance. The honest truth is, is that there has not been any balance in this game for a very long time now. Or perhaps, I am simply misunderstanding what they mean by it.  To me it means that all players are subject to the same experience while playing, and that nothing in the game gets so heavily overloaded that even the lowest ranked players cannot have a satisfactory experience while playing. More succinctly put, everyone who plays can have an expectation that the game itself does not support cheating, manipulating features, whole coalitions made up of alternate accounts or any other thing that gives a certain class of players such an overwhelming advantage that the normal player cannot possibly hope to have the same experience.

I am not a math person, but when I see an army of 80,000 hoplites arrayed against me, where no such army existed a week before I am asking myself, how did that happen? That many cannot be built or bought in that time. This seems to be the newest tactic of many players out there, somehow amassing these large armies of light infantry, fully upgraded, attacking me and my players. When the grain production limits were lifted quite sometime ago, it has allowed for this type of thing to happen here in Sparta. If troop numbers were tied to grain production as it once was then strategy would come back to this game. Now, any player can if they choose to, either by spending or building amass armies of incredible size that far exceeds any reasonable limits that were in place when troops actually left your army if you could not supply them with enough grain.

I have lost and I am losing players nearly on a daily basis as the time passes, there are many reasons for this but when I ask those who have left why they did so, the most common answer is, is that they simply can no longer compete in any meaningful way and they are suffering losses due to poor game performance. Add to that the frustrations of features that do not work, for example something as simple as the sliders used to select an amount of troops to sent to do something. I was told this works to type the exact number in the little box and that will solve that problem, but it does not work either, so if I want twenty of something I have to recall thirty and send ten back to the acropolis in order to have my exact number. Once in awhile I am lucky and the slider hits the number I am looking for, but that is only on occasion. Most often I find myself in this back and forth addition and subtraction exercise in my city to obtain what I want to send.

There are many things that need to be reconsidered or examined with regard to gameplay, things like diplomacy for example. I have a coalition that wants us to go to war with them, they send war request after war request, one after the other for hours on end. After awhile one would think that several denials would stop them from this continuous sending of requests, this is harassment plain and simple, yet no mechanism exists to stop it. Further, when I do decline the request it shows up in chat making us look bad for declining. But, my repeated requests for enemy status were refused with no public mention of it. Small things to some perhaps, but suffering this for two and half months is a bit much.

So it is little wonder that many players have become disillusioned and discouraged when this type of behavior is tolerated by the game. In fact some of it almost encourages this type of behavior by the lack of sanctions to players who engage in questionable activities. Perhaps, this should be visited for the sake of all hardworking and honest players here. Maybe some limits should be placed on the duration of sustained attacks on a coalition. For over two and half months now my coalition has endured nearly constant attacks from two other coalitions, one the main coalition and the other their sister coalition. Most of my experiences in the game against other coalitions have ended when it was obvious that it was time for it to end. Yet this has continued now for the time I mentioned. I am sure Plarium likely does not object to this tactic because of the money being spent by the attackers and us to a lesser extent. Please do not try to tell me to negotiate with them, as I will not negotiate with thugs and bullies. Even so, they bear the dishonor of continuing against an opponent that they cannot defeat, but have too much pride to quit bullying us.

I am not asking for help from Plarium regarding this, just pointing our that here in the game there are many facets of it that need to be re-examined if it expects quality players to remain and play. Most here are aware of the cheating going on in almost every aspect of the game. It seems that if you do not cheat you are in the minority here and are actually penalized for not doing so. Many like playing the game as it was intended to be played, honorably, by the rules, pitting their strategy or tactics against the others, but when the field is so skewed many realize that playing honorably and forthrightly are things that are not valued here or they would be insisted on by Plarium.